Monday, August 24, 2009

A few weeks back I took my kids to the library. They were all excited to finally get their own library cards and pick out books on their own. I, on the other hand, was excited to see Crowdsourcing available on Audio CD and took a copy home.

As an employee of Salesforce.com, I know all to well about Dell’s Ideastorm user community website, as well as a few other examples that Jeff Howe discusses.

I found this Audiobook to be well written, not to mention well read by Kirby Heyborne.

The book discusses the concept of Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Howe back in 2006, its early pioneers and its evolution.

Listeners will find the audiobook descriptive and fun to listen too on the drive home. Fortunately the audiobook does not go into intricate details and formulas. While this makes it a great listen, this might be seen as a shortcoming in the text based version.

The Audiobook focuses on describing how regular people (in crowds) are being tapped to provide research, solve problems, create products (photos, programs, audio, etc.) and feedback in unique ways, sometimes at a nominal fee and sometimes for nothing more than the modern day version of bragging rights.

Crowdsourcing succeeds in being both entertaining and enlightening and I found it quite motivational…perhaps enough to get that special project of mine started.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Check out the latest book from David Taber, Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability, now available for sale. The book focuses on real-world best practices that David has pulled from his experience working on dozens of deployments. The salesforce.com deployment is covered in detail with results-focused tips across a number of departments including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT.

I am in the professional services business, so while it is not my official role to build products; this book has shown me the light … everyone within an organization is responsible for that organizations “product”. Weather that “product” is a physical good, a service sold to customers, or even an administrative “service” that is “sold” internally.

If you an individual contributor stuck in a job, a manager stuck in the day-to-day or an entrepreneur looking to build the next iPod, this book is for you.Some key points from the book:

Discipline and Creativity are not mutually exclusive, the creative process can be enhanced through control

Leverage conflicting goals to invent superior products and services (Do more with less)

Baby steps are generally more effective then radical change

Build solutions that will solve today’s problems

Innovation requires all people in an organization, not just the folks in R&D

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

What can I say, I am a long time CRM advocate, and a Client Services Exec for Salesforce.com. I routinely distribute this book to my customers

New users to Salesforce.com, might not know where to start with their CRM initiatives. The presentation of information in Salesforce.com for Dummies has given many a great jump-start.

This book is for users, not developers and it is laid out in a concise, easy-to-understand manor that even busy sales rep can appreciate.

I will continue to recomend this book to all using, or thinking about using, Salesforce.com. It makes a great CRM program even better...now you can leverage all those inovative Salesforce.com features!

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Years ago I was given a copy of Jeffrey Gitomer's "The Little Red Book of Selling" and promptly did nothing. Wow, what a mistake. After being recommended, and this time reading, the "Little Green Book of Getting Your Way", I immediately started reading other Gitomer.

No this ain't no piece of historic literature, but is a down-to-earth view on what life is all about.

Jeffrey presents practical and ways to implement key principles of persuasion and influence. This is a valuable read for anyone in sales, including those like me, that need to sell theirself every day.

I highly recomend this fun-to-read and practical book for just about anyone in business.

The Dip: Your project/initiative/whatever is all fun in the beginning, your all jazzed up and highly motivated. Then, quit all of a sudden somethign happens and things get really hard. Now you have a choice to make, stick with it or cut your losses.

The "Cul-de-sac": French for dead-end, no matter what you do, you spin your wheels and stay stuck in the mud, these are your typical dead-end jobs and go-nowhere projects. Cut losses here!

The clif: Situations where you cannot quit until the whole thing falls apart. Quitting is often difficult but necessary.

Find a way to quit Clifs and "Cul-de-sac" projects, jobs, etc.

Questions to ask yourself before quitting:Am I panicking?Who am I trying to influence?Am I making measurable progress?

Disclaimer

I am a Customer Success Manager for Salesforce.com. While I work for Salesforce.com, I am not an official spokesperson for Salesforce.com. All information within this blog is freely and publicly available and/or my own personal opinion.